My own exprience here is somewhat odd; I suppose I never really saw why I should favour one gender over another in terms of who I wanted to be, which is probably why I picked up my Dad's rolling stridey walk without thought as to how it asn't all that 'feminine'. I identified with characters like, let's see.. the Doctor. Gair from Power of Three by Dianna Wynn Jones, my favourite book at primary school age. Bilbo (although not Frodo so much). Robinton from the Pern books. Benton Fraser from Due South. I don' think I even noticed that my role models all seemed to be male.
Similarly, it's not a thing I tend to think about when writing characters. I once wrote a short story told from the first person of a woman in loe with her female best friend, and showed it to my writing group, who looked at things anonymously. They didn't realise until part way through that the character was female, and agreed that the author was probably male.
This is I suspect very much a product of how I see the world; to me, my gender is really not that important, and I want to be treated like a me not like a member of a gender group (I do remember getting annoyed as a child and saying that I wanted to, well, not so much *be* a boy, as be *treated* like one of the boys, although I didn't mind the idea of becoming a boy if that would somehow mystifyingly fix it).
However, I do quite like the idea of the Doctor being female and this not being a big deal or a reason for them to suddenly be a fundamentally different person, if only because that would be a reflection on my own experience.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-06-30 11:39 am (UTC)Similarly, it's not a thing I tend to think about when writing characters. I once wrote a short story told from the first person of a woman in loe with her female best friend, and showed it to my writing group, who looked at things anonymously. They didn't realise until part way through that the character was female, and agreed that the author was probably male.
This is I suspect very much a product of how I see the world; to me, my gender is really not that important, and I want to be treated like a me not like a member of a gender group (I do remember getting annoyed as a child and saying that I wanted to, well, not so much *be* a boy, as be *treated* like one of the boys, although I didn't mind the idea of becoming a boy if that would somehow mystifyingly fix it).
However, I do quite like the idea of the Doctor being female and this not being a big deal or a reason for them to suddenly be a fundamentally different person, if only because that would be a reflection on my own experience.